Except sites deliberately break themselves if they can’t harvest your data. You can’t even browse reddit on Tor anymore.
Even merely using Fennec on my phone, I encounter shopping sites where I actually plan to spend money refuse to work because they can’t recognize “my device.” Or they refuse to sell me products where I live if I’m using a VPN. Creepy-ass behavior.
I suppose the only way out is through, and we should simply refuse to use sites that are designed in such a way, but it feels like a losing battle.
lol advance auto parts (one of the three major auto parts stores in the us) won't let u use their site with a VPN. so I just use the other two lol. like I can understand a government website blocking VPN traffic. but auto parts store?
Trying out Librewolf, I realized just how many sites (including Reddit!) use tricks like canvas fingerprinting to identify me up to 99% uniqueness. And here I thought just a VPN, uBO and no cookies would be enough!
There’s so many more tricks to identify you, check out browserleaks.com
It’s honestly scary how easy it is to fingerprint you. I’m using LibreWolf (PC) and Firefox Beta with Resist Fingerprinting and Strict Tracking Prevention turned on (Android) with uBlock Origin in Medium Mode, JShelter in Strict Mode and LocalCDN. That prevents much of it but sadly not everything
Edit: Didn’t click your link, sorry for recommending browserleaks “twice”. My Canvas Fingerprint is 100% unique, although it changes each time I refresh (thanks to JShelter iirc). You can also simply disable WebGL (I think LibreWolf does this by default)
It’s honestly scary how easy it is to fingerprint you
Yeah, 💯. Of course, if we resist fingerprinting too much, we make ourselves have a unique fingerprint again 😁 I assume some of the tools you’ve mentioned randomize the fingerprint instead of just hiding it?
Lots of ways to track besides cookies. There are many ways you can fingerprint a user. It’s actually pretty hard to not have a unique fingerprint on the Internet.
Hes bonkers-senile enough that he could think to the moon is getting richest of all, send him up with an igloo's full of oxegen and mcwhatevers and let short planning bankrupt his assets moonside. Moon Prison 2024. I do feel sorry though for future generations having to deal with that space detritus...
Yup, if I have to hear my uncle tell me another nutjob conspiracy theory about how Trudeau is promoting LGBTQ politics to mask the vaccinations making us gay, I’m going to lose it.
They aren’t slipping that way … they are being marketed and advertised in that direction. It takes money and funding to convince people to think a certain way … look at all advertising, Coca-Cola, Doritos, Gucci, Ferrari, Ford, Google, Facebook, Amazon … most people easily identify these things because of years of advertising.
Conservative parties and politicians are pretty bland individuals and hardly have that much charisma, especially here in Canada … but when you plaster their face and their voice non stop in video, paper, commercials, TV, internet, radio everywhere all the time … it has an effect on people. Look at all the idiots everywhere that have the ‘Fuck Trudeau’ sign everywhere in shirts, cars, trucks, houses, stickers
It all requires funding and money to maintain all that promotion.
So the majority of people aren’t thinking this way … they are being marketed to think that the majority of people are thinking this way.
The longer the marketing happens … the more people believe it.
Can you imagine a place that uses imperial units next to metric units, in some unholy alliance that’s clearly worse than imperial units alone? Welcome to the UK, bruv.
Meanwhile the standard metric measure is 500ml. So US would benefit from dropping the pint in favour of metric, while UK drinkers would be understandably reluctant. Unfortunately, most UK bottles are now 500ml, thanks to shrinkflation. Newcastle Brown held out for a while, so did ciders, but these days pint bottles are quite rare.
Even better, we refer to bottles of liquor as a pint, a fifth and a handle. A pint is 375ml, a fifth is 750ml and a handle is 1.75l. Not even mixed - metric volumes with US customary names.
That link is an unsourced opinion piece on a site belonging to something called the Adam Smith Institute. I’m gonna need something a bit more credible before I believe it tbh.
If that’s ok too, I have read a book by an anthropologist who claims the opposite (that in fact people in the past had more leisure than today). I can look up a good quote tomorrow. For the claim in the post, I’m afraid, there ain’t no good sources, as for most alternative facts.
I mean it seems like the sort of thing people are just ready to believe because “we have technology now so we must have better lives” despite loads of that technology being turned towards controlling us.
As for the book, it wouldn’t be Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber, would it?
You got it the wrong way around: If it’s consensus, no one questions it anymore so you don’t need a source. If you start to question commonly hold beliefs, you will have to unlearn the whole field of economics. Do you want that?
In order to reach a consensus like that, you have to have supporting evidence that it’s true. Otherwise that consensus should absolutely be challenged.
It happens in all kind of scientific fields that things that feel logical and common sense, are taken for granted. I think SciShow made a video about it but I can’t find it right now.
We’re talking about anthropology/history here. People spend their entire careers researching things like this and publishing papers on it.
To make a claim like this requires evidence. Historical records would exist that some person at some point gathered together and published a peer reviewed article on.
If no sources or peer reviewed articles exist on the topic other than a few blog posts, then it’s extremely likely it’s a pile of horse shit.
But talking about anthropologists: here is a quote from David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs:
Feudal lords, insofar as they worked at all, were fighters—their lives tended to alternate between dramatic feats of arms and near-total idleness and torpor. Peasants and servants obviously were expected to work more steadily. But even so, their work schedule was nothing remotely as regular or disciplined as the current nine-to-five—the typical medieval serf, male or female, probably worked from dawn to dusk for twenty to thirty days out of any year, but just a few hours a day otherwise, and on feast days, not at all. And feast days were not infrequent.
He is an anthropologist who devoted his whole career debunking such claims and published a book together with a historian who does the same. It’s called “the dawn of everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021). You should check it out. I could look up more anthropologists to back my claim but I don’t want to spend too much time for people who talk down on me (none of these are block posts, surprised?) and you are yet to come up with all the anthropologists and historians (not economics, they don’t count) who support your claim.
I didn’t make any claim one way or another, I was just saying that any consensus in academia is going to be backed up by some sort of research and evidence.
And anything you inferred as talking down to you was a misinterpretation on your part.
It’s the system I’ve lived with my entire life!! How could it be anything but correct?! I’m a smart guy, I’m sure I’d have noticed if something were amiss.
Economics is less accurate than astrology because at least if you are an astrologist who gets things wrong you stop getting paid. Sure it is cold reading and Barnum statements but it is still more accurate.
Do you also ask for sources when people contend that Julius Caesar was a real person, or that the world is round? Go to JSTOR and start building your case if you’re so keen to display your ignorance about common knowledge, or do you need a SOURCE to tell you that JSTOR actually exists and isn’t a modern fiction?
Don’t be belligerent and you won’t get the door slammed on you, being upset about tone of a message to the point of it overriding your ability to accept its content is overly emotional and extremely childish.
The Adam smith institute is a right wing free market think tank with likely very questionable donors. wiki It likely doesn’t really do research but takes sources that support their preexisting believes and retells them.
Certainly it was at least very hard to make the capitalist exploitation of the worker so all encompassing before the invention of the mechanical watch (Although there was likely a ton of housework and the general situation was garbage what with feudal lords and all that) . It then likely exploded with the industrial revolution and at least in places where the working class managed to emancipate themselves got somewhat cut back. Now especially for countries outside of the west and increasingly also the US and parts of EU it’s likely getting worse, especially with multi employment and precarious employment(gig work, semi self employment, 0h contracts, mechanical turk …).
Generally i feel work where you or your peers get to keep the total output of your work isn’t really a problem, it’s a problem when your work gets appropriated into this terrible machine and as a result you are alienated from the work.
I always find it kinda funny when the right turns to Adam Smith. Smith thought that the free market would free us from the monopolistic tendencies of the mercantile system. (Although he wouldn’t have written it as such, as the term ‘monopoly’ wasn’t nearly as taxonomically precise as it is now.) If he was alive today, he’d probably be rather dismayed at the failures of capitalism.
But then again, I guess that’s the right’s shtick: coopt any idea that they can and pervert it to benefit the ultra-wealthy.
Anyways, here’s Smith:
The object, besides, of the greater part of the bye-laws of all regulated companies, as well as of all other corporations, is not so much to oppress those who are already members, as to discourage others from becoming so; which may be done, not only by a high fine, but by many other contrivances. The constant view of such companies is always to raise the rate of their own profit as high as they can; to keep the market, both for the goods which they export, and for those which they import, as much understocked as they can: which can be done only by restraining the competition, or by discouraging new adventurers from entering into the trade. (The Wealth of Nations V.i.e.10)
It would be funny if it weren’t so sad. As much as reading and understanding smith and other philosophy is important for the individual, think tanks unfortunately seem necessary in a modern context aiming to transform, often quite unreadable, as your excerpt demonstrates, philosophical learning, into applicable law/policy.
As with everything this process is utterly captured by right wing and market fundamentalist interests. Just sort this list by Bias/Affiliation and skim some of the descriptions it’s a bit horrific, but it also might save you from reading an old school stochastic parrot with an inhumane agenda. Or if you actually find one you can agree with it might give you a reasonable first source.
Lol yeah, it’s definitely the “funny-because-that’s-how-I-cope-with-the-absurdity” funny, not the “I’m-actually-having-fun” funny.
Here’s my Luke warm take: It’s kinda a self fulfilling prophecy that think tanks are so “necessary”. They prop up modern thought because our education is so filled with practicality and specialization that there’s not enough time for proper philosophical education, which every person should be offered. And further, that is by design to maintain the status quo.
You certainly don’t get much hat tipping to the early greats, many of whom said in some form or other that the study of philosophy was one of the most important pursuits a person can have in order to live a good life and build a healthy society.
Warm take, because the corpus of human philosophy really is insanely massive, and realistically we do in fact need food and doctors and house builders and whatnot, and there’s too little time and too much to be done for everyone to get a B.A. equivalent in philosophy. Probably. Maybe a think tank has studied the idea.
Yeah this whole thing a bit maximized might be neatly wrapped up in this Hegelian insight rephrased in 2014 found on the wiki
“It is Hegel’s insight that reason itself has a history, that what counts as reason is the result of a development. This is something that Kant never imagines and that Herder only glimpses.”
In this way if not even the greats can do it how could a modern person or a think tank but at the same time does this not imply we currently need all three of them.
Also is the modern YouTube video essay channel sort of a think tank for terminally online people ? Maybe food for thought, maybe a joke who knows really.
Is there any think tank on earth that if all the members suddenly got heart attacks the world would be a worse place?
I think about all the people who I deal with daily and if any single one of them died things would be so much worse for me. They have value and you can see the value they add. How does the Adam Smith institute or CATO do jack shit for anyone? And if we can’t answer that, than why are the people on these committees being paid so well for what isn’t eben a full time job? And why the fuck are they tax exemption!?
Well I might look at this Rosa Luxemburg Foundation or perhaps this Heinrich Böll Foundation if I were in need to peddle some specific policy to someone that both cares and is powerful. It’s in many ways the same prisoners dilemma as with all of advertisement.
So yes if they were all gone it’d be better for everyone but as we unfortunately live in the system we live in I’d rather have the few that might actually represent me exist beside all of the garbage. Same with the political parties they are associated with as well.
The time was very different. Most people lived and worked in the country, not in cities, so de facto they couldn’t control them however they liked. Christian Church was also imposing morality over everything, which means they couldn’t enslave people as easily as today.
We are living in neo-feudalism. Your boss is a lord, and your only freedom is to choose a lord, provided this lord accept you.
Christendom was basically like the church was the structure of society, when you were baptized as an infant and written in the books that was like social security today. The anabaptists weren’t just so radical because they opposed theology, but because they protested the fundamental structure of how society was organized.
Also religion back then was like entertainment as well, people actually loved going to see preachers and they’d talk about them in the same way we talk about shows or movies now. It had that function in the society as sort of a language for discussing fundamental truths and life experience that people loved engaging in. They didn’t have a notion of a political or national identity, but they had a soul and all the stuff to do with that.
The occipital lobe is responsible for us being able to proccess and turn the info our eyes gather into what we see. Severely damaging is can make us be unable to process the info our eyes collect and be effectively blind. Even though there is nothing wrong with our eyes.
You can have a stroke in your occipital lobe and just wake up blind. Or get hit in the back of your head and lose your vision.
There was a meme in Germany during Chancellor Merkel’s time in office. As soon as Merkel “expressed her utmost confidence” in someone, that person resigned shortly afterwards.
Every time I see posts like this I remember a frequent argument I had in the early 2000’s.
Every time I talked with photography students (I worked at an art school) or a general photography enthusiast, I got the same smug predictions about digital photography. The resolution sucked, the color sucked, the artist doesn’t have enough control, etc. They all assured me that digital photography might be nice for casual vacation photos and maybe a few specialty applications but no way, no how, not even when hell freezes over would any serious photographer ever consider digital.
At the time I would think back to my annoying grade school discussions with teachers who assured me that (dot matrix) printers just sucked. Serious writing was done by hand and if you didn’t know cursive you might as well be illiterate.
For some reasons people keep forgetting that technology marches on. The dumb glitches that are so easy to make fun of now, will get addressed. There are billions of dollars pouring into AI development. Every major company and country is developing them. The pay rates for AI developer jobs attract huge amounts of people to solve those problems.
And up to now we have zero indication that the current approach isn’t a dead end. Bill Gates, for instance, thinks that GPT-4 is a development plateau: heise.de/-9337989
It’s possible that the current $100 billion market size of AI and all the AI job openings are completely misplaced but that’s indication that a lot of people have pretty high expectations that AI will continue to grow.
Ah, yes, famous expert in artificial intelligence and machine learning, Bill Gates. I’m personally curious what Taylor Swift thinks about Chat GPT 5, myself. That girl’s got a lot of money, which means she must be smart and has smart opinions on topics like generative AI and the efficacy of currently undeveloped LLMs.
Certainly, but none of those technologies completely replaced things. The existing way of doing things became hobbies and remain the preference over the technology which disrupted the field.
Not to mention, technologies will sometimes flop, only to resurface later in a completely different package. The PDA was maybe popular for a year? But now we all have smartphones which effectively capture that concept. The Wii U failed, but the Switch has been wildly popular.
It’s probably premature to say that AI will completely fail, but also that AI will completely replace everything. I just used a Polaroid camera this past weekend at a wedding, and it was enjoyable in a way digital cameras or phones wouldn’t have been. I still write things out at work, particularly if I’m trying to wrap my head around some math or a difficult concept. Typing it out doesn’t work as well.
I think it is safe to say that there are some things AI will never be able to replace, just like there are some things digital cameras couldn’t replace, nor our phones.
There’s either the “it’ll never work” take or the “it’ll destroy the industry!” take, and both are kinda childish. New technologies are tools, nothing more, nothing less. Learn to use them and they’ll make your life easier. Integrate them if they’re threatening your livelihood. Learn and adapt, it’s how progress has always worked.
I’m guessing this argument has been going on longer than either of us can remember.
There was a long time when guns were considered interesting toys but not something a sane person would take onto the battlefield; especially not without some sort of backup. Hell, the “three musketeers” were more known for their fencing than their firearms skill.
I’m sure back in the day some chucklehead complained that papyrus was cute but anything important had to be carved in stone tablet.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !pixaraimemes
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !pixaraimemes
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